


nine point eight straight down

by BeatriceEagle



Category: DCU (Comics), Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: BASE Jumping, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, also maybe not strictly speaking a friendship, but like a friendship based entirely on trauma and thrillseeking activities, look i just wanted to see Dick and Harley interact okay, so much as it is like a weird therapy pact
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:42:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26872348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeatriceEagle/pseuds/BeatriceEagle
Summary: Every few months, when one of them’s really having a rough go of it, Barbara and Jason meet up to drink whiskey and not talk, a grim little get-together of the So-You’ve-Been-Fucked-Over-By-The-Joker Support Group.Dick and Harley go BASE jumping.
Relationships: Dick Grayson & Harleen Quinzel
Comments: 6
Kudos: 65





	nine point eight straight down

**Author's Note:**

> Me: "I'm going to write a long series of fics exploring the complex dynamics of all of the Bat Family members and really digging into how Bruce is canonically portrayed as a parent!"
> 
> Me: "I'm going to write a fic that does a realistic deep dive into the aftermath of that whole Mirage mess!"
> 
> Me: "I'm going to write a fic about the only thing I really care about, Dick Grayson and Donna Troy's epic bromance!"
> 
> Me: *writes a fic where Nightwing and Harley Quinn go BASE jumping*
> 
> This is set after the Ric Grayson arc, obviously, which I haven't strictly speaking read, but I've seen like a _lot_ of scans of it, so I'm sure I haven't made a huge error that will mortify me later. Although if I have, like, whatever, it's comics, what even is continuity.
> 
> Title is from "When I Fall" by Barenaked Ladies.
> 
> Please do not use the information contained in this fic to try BASE jumping. It is not that well researched.

Every few months, when one of them’s really having a rough go of it, Barbara and Jason meet up to drink whiskey and not talk, a grim little get-together of the So-You’ve-Been-Fucked-Over-By-The-Joker Support Group.

Dick and Harley go BASE jumping.

It’s not always BASE jumping. Sometimes they just go dancing—really hard, limb-flailing, head-pulsing dancing, the kind that shakes your brain up and leaves your muscles sore the next day, no matter how well trained an acrobat you are. Once, Dick took Harley blindfolded train riding. Once, she tried to convince him to take a pole-dancing class.

“It’s not about sex, darlin’,” Harley said, when Dick opted out of that. “It’s about owning your femininity. And your body, and okay, it’s a little about sex, but it’s about owning that too. Unless you’ve got a problem with that?”

Dick laughed and told her about his night as a stripper. “But I think everyone else might have trouble owning their femininity with me in the room.”

“The website _says_ ‘open to all,’” Harley said, but she took him ziplining instead.

Tonight, though, it’s BASE jumping. Dick woke up this morning with the itch in his head, the one that says, _move, circus boy, the walls are closing in_ , so he grabbed two parachutes from Batman’s extreme Boy Scout preparedness/paranoia stash and swung by Harley’s New York apartment. Literally, of course.

“Nightwing!” she squeals, when she sees him hanging outside her window. “What are we doing this time?”

Dick tosses her a parachute. “Let’s go jump off a bridge.”

Harley cackles and leaps straight through the window, into his arms.

As good of a line as it is—Dick can’t resist a good line, and if anyone can forgive him for that, it’s Harley—there aren’t any bridges high enough to jump from in the tri-state area, so it’s gonna have to be a building, instead. They decide to do the jump in Gotham. In New York, they might have to worry about police; in Gotham, no one’s going to bat an eye at two people in costume jumping off a building with parachutes at night. 

They drive there on Dick’s motorcycle, Harley clinging to Dick’s shoulders and whooping wildly on tight turns, Dick grinning into the wind.

It’s impossible to grapple directly to the top of the old Wayne Tower—at over 1000 feet, it’s the tallest building in Gotham, and neither Dick nor Harley nor the Batman himself has a line that extends that far. So they take it in stages, first swinging to the top of a ten-story apartment building nearby, then using that as a launch pad to a series of increasingly tall sky scrapers, until they finally manage to hook their lines on imposing stone balcony that encircles the very top of the Tower.

They take the last ten feet at a climb. No swinging, just good old-fashioned physics and upper body strength. Harley is a foot or so ahead of Dick, and he tries not to stare at her arms and her shoulders and her ass as she climbs; these outings aren’t about that, they’re about the opposite of that.

“Are you looking at my ass?” Harley shouts as she vaults the balcony.

“A little, sorry,” Dick says, landing lightly on the balls of his feet beside her.

“It’s all right, I looked at yours earlier.” Harley looks down. “Sorry.”

They stare each other down a moment—in the eyes, thank you very much—and let it go.

“Check your chute,” Dick says. He pulls his own off his back to check it again.

“Aw, I trust you, sugar.”

Dick rolls his eyes. “Harley.”

Harley giggles and checks her chute.

When they’re done, they stand next to each other—not too close, they don’t want their lines to tangle—at the edge of the balcony, facing the Gotham night. They stand, and look, and breath, and savor being here, and alive, and high high up, and far away from—

—well, from the Joker.

“It wasn’t the Joker, tonight,” Dick says. He feels like he owes it to Harley to admit that, before they jump. “That’s not why I… well, it’s not why I came to see you.”

“That’s okay,” Harley says. “Not _everything_ needs to be about him.”

“It’s just that I thought that’s what this was. You know, the Fuck You Joker Club.”

Harley turns to him and smiles, that off-kilter smile of hers that Dick used to find so off-putting, that somewhere along the way, he came to find recognizable instead. 

“Nightwing,” she says. “Baby. This is the Fuck You Gravity Club.”

And she jumps.

“Motherfucker,” Dick says, and jumps after her.

And it’s fast, fast, faster, the wind in his face like riding a motorcycle but _more_ , because there’s nothing underneath him, and every person who ever thought they owned him is falling straight out of his head and getting left in the air behind him, and all that remains is the speed and the rush and Harley two seconds ahead of him—

He hits terminal velocity.

One. Two. Three. He pulls his chute.

It billows open, and he floats to the ground. He touches down, laughing and out of breath, next to Harley.

**Author's Note:**

> I have [a tumblr sideblog](https://flybynightwing.tumblr.com/) where I yell about my current Batfam readthrough, if that's the sort of thing that interests you.


End file.
